EDP
I came out of the army after years service at 31 in 1974 with the word COMPUTER going through my head. I talked the Government into starting resettlement courses with CDI in Computer Engineering. After this course I went to work for ICL in Bracknell, but by 1980 ICL’s expansion dealings with Singer made me feel uncomfortable as the word redundancy was being spoken about. I approached an agency saying “I would like a job in the area or in South Yorkshire where I come from.”
The response was the offer of the Northern Regional Managers position with a company in Sheffield. I said “Hold on a minute, I am only a in house system maintenance engineer.” The Agency said “That is what we told the Managing Director and his response was does he want the job or not” I left ICL and joined Richard Jowitt in Sheffield. I was the only employee in the company with an engineering title.
The day I arrived Richard told me he was going round the world to look for a computer to ut into small businesses. He came back a week later and told me I was going to ADDS on Long Island, New York for a week to learn about the Mentor Computer.
Initially until I could recruit more engineers I was living with my parents in Doncaster Tuesday to Thursday handling work in the North and being with my wife and children Friday to Monday handling southern problems.
The Northern Regional Manager was more like the Northern Hemisphere Manager.
In 2002 I left the company which by then had ten repair centres.
I was talking to Richard in 2000 and I told him that I had eight years left before retirement but I could not see computer repair engineering lasting that long. The throwaway society was approaching.
I was elected as a DMBC Councillor in 1998, I took redundancy from EDP and carried on as a full time Councillor.
Monty

Great compute and great OS PICK I had been using in post-USSR ministry of Foreign Trade and the experience with MENTOR machine was quite bright and powerful in terms of massive level-up in programming with BASIC for the enormous database of spare parts, invoices, accounting records and entry data forms we used on ASCII RS232 terminals which allow pseudo-graphics to make nice windows and entry screeens. I will remember these magic times for the rest of my life as the most productive in my programmer career. Later I bacame the CFO of RUssia in a multinational company in Mining and I still cherish and respect the Great Effort which MENTOR designers and engineers made for us to be more than happy and successful users of this GEM. Cheers to all the super-team of ADDS guys - who will be forever remembered in our country. I realize that computers of today maybe are much top gear etc. While old stuff like MENTOR and PICK will never be beaten by new HI-Tech. We people of 90s will always trust in real gear. Cheers to all folks who like MENTOR and PICK!! Br Oleg

I worked at EDP in Sheffield and then Milton Keynes from about 1986 to 1989. I worked for Alan Lees who is mentioned in another post. I repaired all the various ADDS systems supplied and eventually supervised the repair center eventually...

I loved programming in PICK. Nothing else like it. Taught me about data structures and objects long before that was even a thing, it just made sense.